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Exhausted By Joy
Field notes from the day Biden won the election
“Where were you when you found out Biden had won?”
I was drinking coffee in my apartment, watching The Great British Bake Off.
I was wearing an XXL t-shirt advertising Brooklyn Brewery’s Defender IPA (a limited edition beer made for Comic-Con) and Christmas pajama pants.
I was confused. I heard my neighbors cheering, but it wasn’t 7 PM, the time when everyone “claps because they care” for essential workers. I looked out my window and saw a jogger. Maybe today is the virtual NY Half Marathon?
I was frantic. I wrenched pots and pans from my cabinets, weighed them in my hands, wondered which ones would produce the most ruckus. I couldn’t find a wooden spoon and a spatula sounded puny, so I abandoned the task, returned to the window, leaned out as far as I could to take in noise as colorful as the Brooklynites making it. An air horn, a kazoo, ambulance chirps, church bells, a boombox playing Hit the road Jack and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.
I was crying. A Latina friend called and kept saying, “We did it. We did it. We did it.” She spent the last four years afraid. I spent the last four years vainly trying to comfort her. Despite her pain, she believed in America more than I did. In…
